With more than half the votes counted “No” is leading by eight points.
This is, to be honest, precisely the result I expected. It was always inevitable that polls would exaggerrate the “Yes” vote by 2-4 points.
If they were sensible they’d slash the taxes on whiskey and tobacco to become a magnet for people in europe who prefer cheap stuff.
Anyway this is delicious: As Alex Salmond’s backyard of Aberdeenshire appears to have gone 60% No, one of his flunkies rationalizes it thus:
*SNP MSP Stewart Stevenson said: "At the end of the day, you always prefer to win but we always knew the size of the mountain we had to climb in Aberdeenshire.
"The challenge now bluntly in Aberdeenshire and elsewhere is for those who’ve won the referendum to deliver on the promises that they made to the people of Scotland.
"I think that’s actually a very substantial challenge indeed for the No side. They’ve set themselves an ambitious target for moving forward with new powers for Scotland.
"In Aberdeenshire we’ve always seen it as a tough call, and if Aberdeenshire shows us what’s happening nationally, and I don’t know what the result is going to be, it delivers the challenge to our opponents. That’s the bottom line.
“Nobody can walk away from this campaign, whatever the result is, without picking up a challenge.”*
Independent.ie( Irish )
One so rarely sees a politician dribbling incoherently in public.
Surely you mean “yet more proof”. Social media is generally young people heavy (who are less likely to vote historically) and people into social media are often deluded into thinking that online comments are as good as going out and voting.
It would be a good idea for future ruling Archons to persuade young rebels that it is entirely the same thing.
Just sit back now and await inevitable victory…
And the price of oil. Thats an awful lot of unknowns to be basing any sort of economic or fiscal policies on. I suspect an Independent Scotland would be either marginally better off or marginally worse off than a Scotland in the Union. I don’t think we could afford an oil fund and high public spending - at least without corresponding increases in taxation.
Looks like No won, yes?
The Inverclyde Council vote should be noted:
62,481 votes cast. 86 vote difference.
NO 27,329 50.08%
YES 27,243 49.92%
Our taxation on the Whisky industry is a real bugbear of mine. I almost welcome the day when it is destroyed by competition. Well, perhaps not destroyed, but has enough pressure put on it to need reduced taxation.
We really should have tourists by the hundreds of thousands coming over here for cheap whisky. Instead, our Govt(both British and Scottish) see the industry as a cashcow for tax revenue.
I got a ten on that quiz, FWIW.
Still looking like NO is winning.
It’s all but over. No real Yes heartlands remain. At least no significant ones.
Oh, c’mon guys. YES SCOTLAND hasn’t won, but as the campaign has progressed they have improved their position steadily, and they came closer to winning than I think anyone would have predicted eighteen months or two years ago. And a lot of commentators put this down, at least partly, to a campaign which which was much more enthusiastic, and much better organised, than the BETTER TOGETHER offering.
As for campaigning not translating into actual voting, this referendum has seen the highest ever voter registration in Scotland, and - by a considerable margin - the highest ever turnout percentage of registered voters since mass suffrage in Scotland. Whatever other criticisms you might make of the campaign, this one just flies in the face of the evidence.
My prediction: a tonne of people are going to go nuts on the maxdevo. "No only won because you promised virtual independence. ".
Right! I have no dog in this fight, but I don’t understand the mentality of giving something to a group to maintain union. They want it or they don’t. So either you are no longer on equal ground or you weren’t to start with and the threat shouldn’t have been necessary.
I should have been clearer. If I’d gone by what I experienced on social media I would have predicted a 90% Yes. Granted, most people I follow online are not Scottish but a decent cohort are and they were all Yes voters and shared Yes opinions of swathes of other Scottish people. I just meant that (superficial anyway) social media analysis may be wildly inaccurate in such things.
I should not have used the term activism.
[QUOTE=UDS]
Oh, c’mon guys. YES SCOTLAND hasn’t won, but as the campaign has progressed they have improved their position steadily, and they came closer to winning than I think anyone would have predicted eighteen months or two years ago. And a lot of commentators put this down, at least partly, to a campaign which which was much more enthusiastic, and much better organised, than the BETTER TOGETHER offering.
As for campaigning not translating into actual voting, this referendum has seen the highest ever voter registration in Scotland, and - by a considerable margin - the highest ever turnout percentage of registered voters since mass suffrage in Scotland. Whatever other criticisms you might make of the campaign, this one just flies in the face of the evidence.
[/QUOTE]
Well, if NO SCOTLAND was so badly run, they also managed to get more people out to support No. So either the YES SCOTLAND campaign got people to vote against Yes or the NO SCOTLAND people energized more people better to support the status quo.
Anyway, I hope the thing is forgotten soon: Scotland will get more devolution, and allegedly so will others, and nationalism will go quiet for a few years. Mr. Salmond said if YES lost, it would be unchallenged for a generation; however this was clarified to mean until he stepped down in 2016.
There’s no point in triumphalism nor recrimination: I hope Salmond is neither blamed nor pushed out. He did his best. Had the Scots gone the other way, though, Cameron would definitely have been kicked out; and this not happening makes any victory as bittersweet as all these affairs.
Yes. The yes campaign gained maybe 4 points over 18 or 24 months. Kudos.
“Even though we lost, we raised the level of the debate” is classic political response to a loss, fyi. But the fact of the matter is that this was a big deal and the yes campaign can’t lay claim to the voter turnout.
The “No” campaign won by (last check) 10.5 percentage points. That’s a thumping by any standard. And where the turnout was higher than 80% No always won.
I agree. But equally we can’t say that the YES campaign failed to get voters out, which is what I initially understood you to be suggesting.
I don’t see how you could have understood me that way. What you quoted was pretty explicitly talking about social media participation.
84% of the electorate turned out and the difference was less than 400K votes. Impressive indeed.
As I mentioned above, Inverclyde turn out was 62,481.
No : 27,329
Yes: 27,243
A difference of just 86 votes! With numbers like those you just know that this issue cut straight through households.